Creative Commons and intellectual property

To start figuring out what the terms Creative Commons (cc) and Intellectual Property (IP), I first looked in the class text The Missing Manual. But I didnt find anything useful. My next step was to “JGI” (Just Google it).

Creative Commons

“to encourage creative people to offer up their creative works– protected by copyright law– for others to legally build upon and share, including text, music, pictures, and videos.”

I take this to mean that under a (CC) copyright licences a creator of a work, be it text, music, pictures or videos, can say to the viewers of the work what they can do with the creation and how it should be used.

There are six different types of (CC) licences to choose from:

Attribution (CC BY) This (CC) lets others distribute, remix and build upon your work. This can be done even the commercial field, so long as they point back to the creator and give credit. This licences if the most flexible.

Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA) Like the regular Attribution, a viewer can distribute, remix and build upon your work, but all new works baised on yours has to be licensed in the same way that you licensed yours. An example of this is Wikipedia.

Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) Under this licence works can be redistributed for commercial or non-commercial means, but the work cannot be changed and must point back to you the creator.

Attribution-NonComercial (CC By-NC) viewers can distribute, remix and build upon your work so long as they credit you and the new work isn’t used commercially. If you go with this rout the new work doesn’t have to be licensed the same way as the original, but still has to point to the original.

Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) This on similar to the (CC By-NC) but the new work has to be licensed under identical terms to the original.

The most restrictive (CC) is Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC By-NC-ND). your work can only be downloaded and shared with others if they credit the creator, and they cannot make any changes or use it commercially

(CC)’s offer a simple form of legal protection for your work. This system also allows for easy sharing in the academic worlds. The drawbacks to (CC) is that once you decide which (CC) you are going to have for your work you cannot change it.

Intellectual Property

“Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.”

These creations of the mind are protected by three different forms of law: Patents, Copyright, and trademarks. They are similar to (CC)s in the fact that they both protect the idea and its creator from people who would take the idea and try to pass it off as their own. they also protect the markets from copies of the same products.

To me it seems that (IP)s are more for the world of commerce while (CC)s are for the worlds of science and education.

When it comes to getting a (CC) for my own blog I think I might do the Attribution-ShareAlike. Not 100% positive about this yet. Once I’ve made up my mind I might use the Creative commons generator that Dustin Waulk found for his blog Just Passing Through on January 23 2014.